Charlie chuckled, and Meg felt her blush meet the apples of her cheeks. While she wanted to add it was best of all to know he remembered her, she couldn’t say that in front of his family.
“Charlie was just telling us about how you’d gone back into the bowels of the ship to rescue a little girl,” Pamela explained. “Your lady-in-waiting’s daughter?”
Meg looked at Charlie who gave her a reassuring nod. “Oh, yes,” Meg said. “Ruth is more like my niece than anything else. She’d lost her doll and slipped away from her parents. So I went down to find her.”
“It seems odd to me that the daughter of a First Class passenger’s lady would go all the way down there to find a doll. Is that where she was being accommodated?” Grace’s inquiry had even more questions behind it, and while Meg could understand why the older sibling was suspicious of her intentions, she felt her abdomen tighten and her palms grow clammy.
“Everything was chaotic that night,” Charlie stated. “People were everywhere, running about, shouting. I spent at least half-an-hour trying to convince women who spoke no English to get aboard the final lifeboats. It’s quite easy to understand how a child might get lost.”
His voice was still raspy, but it grew stronger the more he spoke, and Meg longed to reach out and hold his hand, the way she’d held it most of the time they were aboard Carpathia.
“And then once you found her, what happened next?” The question came from Mr. Ashton, whose eyes reminded her of Charlie’s. Twinkling and inquisitive.
Meg didn’t like to think about what happened directly after that, so she skipped over the part where she was certain she and Ruth were about to drown or freeze to death in the rising water. “Then Charlie found us and led us to safety,” Meg replied. She wanted to tell his parents that Jonathan had managed to procure a key that he’d given to Charlie that allowed him to unlock the gate which had prevented Meg and Ruth from going any higher in the boat, but the moments she’d stood there with Ruth clinging to her shoulders were some of the most dreadful of her entire twenty years, and she didn’t intend to rehash them now.
“That’s simply marvelous!” Pamela proclaimed. “How did you manage to find them?”
She was looking at Charlie, and it took him a moment to answer. Eventually, he gave a small shrug. “I’m honestly not sure. I just kept looking until I could hear them shouting my name, and then I hurried to the source of the noise.”
His eyes flickered to that haunted look Meg had seen so many times aboard Carpathia when he’d complained of the screaming, but then they cleared almost as quickly. She wondered if some of the voices he heard in his head were hers and Ruth’s.
“How lucky is that?” Mr. Ashton said with a laugh, looking at his wife.
“Charlie makes his own luck,” Peter offered, joining in on the chuckle. Grace said nothing, only forced a smile on her pretty face that looked every bit as fake as the pearl necklace Meg’s doll, Lilac, had worn when she was a child.
Meg exchanged glances with Jonathan as the rest of the family continued to comment on how fortunate they all had been, and then she returned her attention to Charlie. While it was true they were all lucky to be sitting there, she certainly didn’t think their experiences were as jolly as they were being made out to be, and she wondered if this was just the family’s way of dealing with the pent up emotions from not knowing where Charlie had been.
After the giddiness died down a bit, Mr. Ashton turned to Meg and said, “I’m sure your parents were relieved to hear you are well.”
She glanced at Charlie whose eyes told her he had not revealed anything, and then she looked at Jonathan who gave a small shrug. “Actually,” Meg began, with a sigh, “my father died when I was a little girl, and I’ve only my mother.”
“How very sad,” Pamela replied, but Mr. Ashton looked at her long and hard, as if he saw something familiar in her face.
“Would it be possible for Charlie and me to speak in private for just a few moments?” Meg asked, not sure how to best explain the situation to them but seeing that their time was limited by the expression in the eyes of her father’s former roommate.
“Certainly,” Pamela said. “We are happy to step out for a moment.”
As she and Mr. Ashton rose, Peter following, Grace lingered on the chair briefly. Peter offered his hand, and she pulled herself up, muttering, “My brother has only just returned from the dead, but why not? Take your time.”
“Grace,” Pamela said sharply, under her breath, as she took her daughter’s arm, “give them a moment.” She looked over her shoulder and offered Meg a smile, as if she was apologizing for her daughter’s rudeness, but Meg honestly didn’t care at the moment. She was certain Grace would hate her even more once she knew who she really was, especially if she knew what she had done to Charlie before they left Southampton.
Jonathan was the last to stand, and before he went to follow the family out the door, he said, “Now is as good a time as any.”
Meg nodded in agreement, knowing fully what he meant. If they were going to be honest with Charlie’s family, they needed to do so now. He went out and closed the mahogany doors behind him, careful to keep it as quiet as possible when they came together.
She wanted to see Charlie properly, but as he was mostly facing the fire, the angle of her chair was wrong, so she scooted it around, minding the legs of the chair on the wooden floor. Once she was seated as near him as possible, her knees brushed up against the side of his leg beneath the heavy blanket, she let go a sigh of relief.